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From Boston Dynamics: "Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings. Current development of Sand Flea is funded by the The US Army's Rapid Equipping Force."

This gadget does exactly as promised: it looks like a thumbdrive (sort of) and fries the circuitry of any computer it’s plugged into. It’s made from camera flash parts, is charged with a standard AA battery, and delivers a 300V zap of DC destruction to the port for all your USB-murdering needs. Note that this […]

The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

My only hope is that once they’ve been manufactured in vast numbers to ensure our destruction the hackers can viral program them to deliver us hot dogs and strawberry milk in our secret tree fort terminator-proof strongholds.

There could be a sacrificial plate on the top and bottom, gets dropped, jump legs use that as a surface. Not perfect, but could work… or the plate is on a string and somehow travels and retracts mid-jump?

I always get mildly amazed by these cool new technologies, only to be followed by that stingy, sour notion of them always being apart of programs funded by the military. The F-35 program comes to mind. The scepticism, critique is diminished over the false feeling of national pride.

We don’t care where it comes from, where it ends up, we just like the shiny thing before our eyes and think nothing else of it. What if national defense as we label it, wasn’t given ridicolous budgets and resources and were instead focused on improving civilian fields. Fields that would give actual returns.

Lots of my physicist friends in grad school were funded via the DOD. Often times what they were working on was only marginally related to any ostensible military purpose. A lot of basic physics research gets picked up by the DOD, because physics is just kind of seen as their purview – other things like ORNL and Livermore that DO have military applications are funded this way, so I guess they figure it makes sense to keep all that expertise in-house. Meanwhile, me in the biology department got all my government funding via NSF/NIH, because that’s seen as THEIR purview. So the fact that funding comes from the DOD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s meant to produce a weapon or anything relevant to the battlefield; it might just be an administrative thing.

That said, the DOD has a ton of research funding, and they definitely DO use a lot of it for funding battlefield-relevant research, including Boston Dynamics. It always made me sad that BD needed to get DOD funds to make cool robots (especially since I have friends who work there), and that a lot of these technologies might, indeed, eventually be weaponized, so it’s not inconceivable that a Big Dog chases you down and riddles you with bullets. That, however, seems to be the sad reality of it: if you want to make cool robots, the only people with the money to throw around at such ridiculous concepts are the masters of war. And now that we’ve had such great success killing people with flying robot drones, it seems inevitable that this is the way military development will go. Expect more killer robots in the future.

I’m imagining a series of shorts revolving around the two characters(Berenstain bears style; but less played out) that starts out being really lighthearted (Big Dog and Sand Flea visit the laboratory!) moves into the slightly-too-naive-to-not-be-creepy (Big Dog and Sand Flea at the Trade Show, Big Dog plays at the Proving Grounds), and eventually dives headlong and wallows stubbornly in the hypermodern dystopia of being an adorably expendable character(who dies endlessly but can be replaced by ordering another of the same part number) in a series of barely-distinguishable medium intensity conflicts of attrition(Big Dog and Sand Flea visit Helmand Province, On Patrol with Big Dog, Sand Flea Delivers the Payload, Big Dog and the Roadside Bomb Mystery, etc, etc.)

I suspect that, unlike some of Boston Dynamics’ designs, this might be one where the “90/10” rule actually works in your favor(“90/10” in the sense that getting the first 90% of the result is comparatively trivial; but the last 10% of the polish is hard. Something like a Big Dog would just fall over without that polish, but I suspect that somebody with an RC chassis, a disregard for their own safety when handling large springs, and a willingness to sacrifice some of the leap-accuracy and computer stabilized camera goodness could probably hack one together…)

I remember seeing flipper-type competitors on Robot Wars that could do pretty impressive jumps when self-righting; nowhere near as high, but that *was* about a decade ago. So it’s probably possible to get something surprisingly similar going with amateur robotics now.

Now that I’m looking for it, the only one that looks like it didn’t have a cut was when it jumped off the roof. I’m going to guess it was because it didn’t jump very high and didn’t need to “wind up” or whatever it’s doing.

Based on the fairly slow motion of those flipper things, and the realistic likely speed of a motor geared down far enough to push energy into an elastic storage mechanism capable of launching a vehicle 30-feet, it might be a notrivial amount of time…

If the design is analogous to real fleas, the ‘dead time’ would be a geared-down motor or similar putting a serious spring(probably a coil spring, since there isn’t too much room in there) under a great deal of tension before a mechanical latch suddenly releases the spring and dumps the accumulated energy more-or-less instantaneously into the jumping legs.

To the best of my knowledge, a motor(of reasonable volume) that can deliver that much power over such a short time is a vanishingly rare beast. The drive circuit you’d need to dump that much power into an inductive load would also be a fair trick.

I wouldn’t claim to know the details, and there were probably a few that needed to be nailed down to get it to actually work; but I’d put some money on the cut section being the robot sitting there and gradually winding a somewhat scary spring(pneumatics might conceivably work as well; but I don’t see any hoses or hear any compressor, and you’d need some pretty fair bore sizes to get jumps like that…)

there was a cut on the roof as well, but it’s only obvious in the audio. There are actually two cuts for each jump: in addition to a cut directly prior to each jump, there is also a cut immediately before the legs extend. (ed: reply to rrh)

the fact that we live in a world where this is a weapon and not a toy says a lot about the priorities of our government. I mean this things would be put to better use on christmas day than in the trenches.